The-Slight-Edge

invest in Yourself 145
reference, and now you are in a place where you can learn more. Then you learn
more, and it gives you more insight into what you experienced in your activity,
so now you re-approach activity with more insight. And back and forth, it goes.
This back-and-forth rhythm is worth noting. It is the rhythm of success.
Remember when we talked about “baby steps”? This learning-and-doing
sense of rhythm is something you learned even before you learned to walk,
and it’s even more basic. Psychologists have found crawling is one of the most
important activities we ever accomplish, because it profoundly affects the brain
and its capacity to learn. The right-hand-left-leg, left-hand-right-leg rhythm
of alternation acts upon our nervous systems like the surf upon the coastline,
developing it, shaping it, and preparing it for all sorts of more sophisticated levels
of learning and awareness later in life.
You’ve heard the expression, “Before you can walk, you have to crawl.” There
is more profound truth to this than most of us ever realized. That alternating
rhythm, and your capacity to coordinate the behavior of opposites, is a critical
Slight Edge skill. Balancing book smarts and street smarts is one aspect of that,
and so is the daily success strategy that we’ll look at next: course correction.
Course Correction
You return again and again take the proper course—
guided by what? By the picture in mind of the place
you are headed for ...
— John McDonald
What’s the shortest path between two points? A straight line, right? Wrong.
While that might be true in theory, it’s never true in reality. And reality is where
you and I live—and where we succeed or fail.
Have you driven on any roads lately that are perfectly straight? Even when
you’re on one of those interstates that seems like a long straight line to forever,
do you hold the steering wheel perfectly still? Or do you move it back and forth,
constantly correcting the direction the car is headed? That constant moving of
the steering wheel is so familiar, it’s second nature, and you probably never think
about it. But if you decided to hold the wheel rigidly in place, you’d be off the
road, probably in less than a minute.
And in case you think that’s just a matter of engineering, or of imperfections
in the road’s surface, this next example may come as a bit of a shock:
On its way to the moon, the miracle of modern engineering that is an Apollo
rocket is actually on course only two or three percent of the time; for at least